Distinctly Montana Magazine

4 5 Y E A R S O F H A U N T E D W A T E R S 2 8 of the landscape show just how impossible the situation was for the young men who died in one of the worst disasters faced by the Forest Service. "Black Ghost," the story chosen to open Young Men and Fire, follows the 15-year-old Maclean as he fights his way through a forest fire in the Fish Creek area of west- ern Montana. While he works in the forest northwest of Lolo Hot Springs, a fire traps him in a box canyon. He has no option but to climb the steep hillside before him. As he struggles to breathe, trapped in smoke so heavy he can barely see, he catches sight of an apparition. At first, he thinks someone wants to help him. Instead the black ghost slaps him hard in the face, knocking the boy back toward the flames. Fighting al- most terminal exhaustion, Maclean recognizes that only he can save himself. In remembering the incident, he knows he must tell the story of the young men trapped and killed by the Mann Gulch fire of 1949. Later, Maclean and his brother-in-law drive back to a portion of the woods left to burn by the fire crew, who knew that the fire wouldn't be able to jump the lines again. His description of the inferno is nightmarish, surreal, even expressionist: "It was a world of still-warm ashes that had incubated once-hot holes. The black poles looked as if they had been born of the grey ashes as the result of some vast effort at sexual intercourse at the edges of the afterlife. When the vast effort was over, it was discovered that the poles were born dead and the ashes themselves lived only because the winds moved them." d d d Another posthumous publication, The Norman Ma- clean Reader, followed in 2008. This collection includes the five chapters of an unfinished manuscript looking at the tragedies of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, or Custer's Last Stand, as Maclean referred to it. Maclean had been attempting to write about Custer beginning in 1959. The story grabbed Maclean's imagination, and he brought his academic and person- al interests into play as he attempted to make sense of that tragedy. His love of Montana's landscape comes through clearly in his writing. Maclean describes "Custer's Hill" thus: "It is close to a finished composition—a hilltop in a big sky; repeating the circle of the hilltop, a circle of kneeling men in blue; within the embattled circle a central figure highlighted by blonde hair; and, surrounding the circle of blue, larger circles of contrasting redskins." Forgiving the admittedly archaic use of "redskins," we find that the three colors described, red, blue and blonde, more than resemble the colors of the flag: in his hands, Custer's folly becomes the story of America. He follows that passage with an interesting point: "The battle has also the power to promote business, draw customers and sell beer. And it has two powers perhaps deeper than the others—the power of horror and of jest." d d d We return to where we started. Maclean's most famous description of a landscape, and the one from which this issue derives its title, are the final words of A River Runs Through It. With this passage, the Blackfoot becomes more than a mere river, however beautiful, but a poetic statement once again combining geologic time with the universal experience of love and loss. They recall the final words of The Great Gatsby, in which Fitzgerald compares being alive to "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," but per- haps even more beautiful and more wise: "Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters." SITE OF CUSTER'S LAST STAND Litt le Big Horn

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